Tuesday, April 7, 2015

At a Starbucks on Canal Street, Wilbo Waits for the Big Easy to Become Easier.

Waiting for the Big Easy to become Easy. It's the ultimate tourist
town alright with the antipathy for people written in numerous acts of
micro-aggression. This is a town that cultivates a crowd for Mardi
Gras, and yet that Fat day favors a fat wallet. Go to San Francisco or
Chicago and a Starbucks has an open loo. The one on Canal Street has a
key pad. Folks just wait at the door or ask seated customers for the
key code, today 12015. As for myself, I feel fairly comfortable
walking into the lobby of a four star hotel and accessing the comfort
station.

I am, after all, an early reader of Ask Audrey, a psychologist who
pioneered group therapy for people with Crohns and Colitis. She had a
whole chapter on aggressively accessing comfort stations in any
circumstances. Audrey wasn't my therapist unless I was sitting in
group therapy with my former wife. I saw her husband, Larry, at a
hundred bucks an hour at the commencement of our separation. Audrey
and Larry attended theater at a favorite playhouse in Hamtramck, a
black box where my kid learned to love the footlights and greasepaint
and the script. Saw their names up on the donor board. As for me, I
coached the playhouse on non-profit management when the house had no
fund raising.

This is the night of the Expanding Man. I let that story get carried
away. Note well, I am writing fiction and you are willing reading an
unreliable narrator. As for downtown New Orleans, it's looking a
little like Urinetown. Oh, I'll be on a bar stool with a convenient
loo soon; but right now I want to walk and that requires a convenient
pissoire.

Ordinarily, one can expect free parking & even free valet parking at a
casino. Harrah's has an enviable position at the south end of Canal
Street, near the Canal Street Ferry Landing. Its garage makes a wager
with the motorist: pay thirty dollars for twenty-four hours parking or
gamble for thirty minutes. So I put my car up on the top floor; not
sure if I'm going to play Deuces Wild at a quarter a hand or rely on
my Blackjack skills. That's 150 hands of Deuces Wild; six hands of
five dollar Blackjack. The two have small house edges when played
right. So I parked the car & took that bet as I have a pretty reliable
game. Stupid game. Haven't played since Little River in July when I
played for three hours, dead heat on the money. Enormous waste of
time. Better vig, as in vigorish, trolling the resale shops and estate
sales for old paintings with hidden value.

I've booked Saturday & Sunday at an adequate hotel out by the airport.
Tonight, I'll see if I can stay out around the clock in NOLA without
ending up in a dumpster. I want to take the Canal Street ferry across
the Mississippi River tomorrow, pay respects at a few old churches,
tour a few art galleries, tour the NOLA NOMA. That's New Orleans
Museum of Art, y'all.

Maybe I'll take a nap at the St Louis Cemetery, one from which I
awake. If it doesn't rain again. How better to allow the sleepers
awaiting the resurrection easy conversation with my dreaming mind?

Monday, I'll gun it home, a thousand miles, to be home for Christmas
Eve in Muskegon. If you know Skeetown, you know it is the Biggest
Easy.

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